Community Capitalism

What was the greatest technology investment of the 2010s that was available to the general public? Answer: The Ether Sale in 2014

Capitalism totally changed that. People built things together and share the risk among investors, founders and employees. Risk, reward and ruin were separated when joint-stock companies became more common. The prerequisite for successful entrepreneurship shifted from inheritance to initiative.

I predict we will see a multi-billion dollar company in the 2020s that was seeded with crowdfunding capital. This is a massive shift away from restrictive accredited investor laws.

Every month, a bunch of new ways to earn tokens pops up: mining, staking, liquidating, curating, slashing, contributing, securing, managing. Protocols are rewarding the participants with a share of the capital—communities of people are owning crypto-equity alongside the founders, investors, and team.

While stock options certainly can have their drawbacks, it is really remarkable to see the employees of incredible companies benefit from partial ownership. There have been companies like this for a while—community banks and employee-owned retailers have been around for a long time. However, they are not usually super profitable enterprises so they... See more

This shift is really where community capitalism starts to take off. The investors, founders, employees, workers and users are now going to be owners. These kinds of things were simply not possible before Ethereum. A blockchain is a really great accounting mechanism for the Internet.

The second huge thing the SEC announced this year was a proposal to allow gig workers to receive stock compensation.

The last 1,000 years can be roughly split into two 500-year chunks: feudalism & capitalism. Feudal lords controlled all of the land, farms, buildings and capital. This was passed down inside families and never distributed to the workers. There was no way for anyone to create new forms of capital because they could not get access to any in the first... See more